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It feels like this is a conversation I'm only beginning to have; a conversation I’ve somehow been in the middle of ever since I was eleven years old. I was in a social studies class sitting on the floor of an air-conditioned classroom watching a documentary. An Aboriginal woman was weeping about the children that were taken. There was a strange salty ball knotted in my belly. When the program finished and the lights were turned back up a kid next to me said that ‘All Abos are drunks anyway, they can’t look after their children.’ A chorus of agreement rose in the room.

Mostly I remember the shock; still soaked in the woman’s tears I stared around my class of upper middle class white kids. It was the first time I noticed racism.

I still don’t really understand it. Mostly because our nation is busy avoiding the topic. We’re a happy-go-lucky country of friendly mates giving everybody a fair-go. We are most certainly not racist.

Today I'm in Chiang Mai, a week ago New Mexico, a month before that, a
small red dirt mining town in the North West of Australia, and for a
dizzying and strange spell, I lived in a studio apartment in the buzzing
centre of Sydney. I'm not really sure what I'm doing. Are you?